Venture Ventured
by twosmall
Summary: Vin Venture is a dimensionally-displaced Mistborn who wants to get back to Elend and save her world.
1. Chapter 1

One second I was falling through thick mist that swirled around me while fighting twelve people whose eyes had been pierced with metal spikes.

The next I was standing, green grass in front of me. The sound of children laughing filled my ears. My adrenaline was gone. None of my muscles were tensed. No metals were burning in my gut.

It was too much, too rapid a change. I did not stumble, but I was disoriented.

I stared at the alien grass. Green grass. My lips parted slightly. My eyes widened.

Grass wasn't green! Grass was brown. I looked at the blue sky and shook my head. It wasn't raining ash. The sky was clear. How could the grass live if there was no ash for it to dissolve? It wasn't natural.

Where were the mists?

I took a step back. _Am I dead?_

 _No._

I had fought twelve Inquisitors at once. It was hard to wrap my head around, since I had been winning. Kelsier, my mentor, had become a legend after killing just one Inquisitor, but I had been able to fight twelve of them at the same time.

 _The battle!_

Adrenaline shot through me and I flared Pewter. Pewter was one of the physicals metals. When it was burned, it made me stronger, faster, and tougher. When I flared it the Pewter in my system was used up more quickly, but the effect I got from it was amplified. Strength surged through me.

Past the grass in front of me, about ten yards away, there were children playing on brightly colored metal in a field of wood mulch. But behind me? There could be Inquisitors.

I spun! My tasseled mist cloak echoed my spin, hundreds of gray strips of cloth caught up in my momentum swept in a pendulum before crashing against my front. By the time I had turned, the twin obsidian knives that had been in sheathes on my belt were already in my hands.

I was ready to fight. Knees bent slightly. Eyes darting. People. Dozens. Men and women. But none of them had metal spikes through their eyes. They weren't Inquisitors.

Most of them were sitting on benches and staring at me. Parents watching children play? Some were starting to stand. They couldn't be skaa. The clothes were too fine and the people were too tall. Their clothing was strange too. Blue pants and white shirts? And the dresses they wore? I wasn't a prude, but they were scandalous. I averted my eyes, a blush creeping onto my cheeks.

The tassels of my cloak were caught by gravity. They draped over my arms. If someone thought that would hinder me, I would kill them before they could realize their mistake. But nobody was attacking.

I had panicked for a good reason, I couldn't have known there was no enemies until I had confirmed it, but I still felt a bit foolish. Standing near children who played without a care in the world with knives drawn wasn't my best moment.

I stopped burning Pewter and strength faded from my limbs. Then I sheathed my knives, dropped my arms to my sides and stood up straight. The tassels of my mistcloak fell, then swung back around me, resettling into the cape that was common among everyone that had the powers I did.

Everyone I could see was staring at me. Some looked frightened. Others shocked. It was rare that a Mistborn let themselves be seen openly. I was probably the first one they had ever seen. Some might even have thought that Allomancy was just a myth told to scare skaa.

Lord Ruler! I had once thought it was just a myth. Had it really been only a few years ago that I had been working for a third-rate thieving crew, barely managing to survive on the crumbs that I helped scam from the nobility?

I took a deep breath. Things were strange, but I wasn't a girl who only hid in the shadows watching for danger. Not anymore at least. There was more to me now. I was a ruler. A warrior; Elend's knife, the knife of the New Empire.

People would be looking to me for guidance and expecting me to fight their battles. Especially now. If I panicked, they would pick up on that. It had been mere seconds since I had arrived, but I was already adapting to the situation. I needed to figure out which of the Outer Dominances I was in, get in touch with whoever was ruling it, and then get in touch with Elend.

But I needed to act quickly. _Every second I waste is a second in which my people are dying._

"I am Vin Venture," I announced, raising my voice so everyone could hear. "Wife of the Emperor Elend Venture! Empress of the New Empire! Mistborn and Heir of the Survivor! I killed the Lord Ruler! I come from the Inner Dominances, where Ruin's touch has grown heavy on the world. Who rules this Dominance as my husband's regent?"

It was important that I make it clear that I had killed the Lord Ruler. I was small and scrawny, even though I was twenty years old. I would probably never break a hundred twenty pounds. It was my heritage as someone who was half-skaa. The Lord Ruler had bred the Skaa to be docile servants who would never manage to overthrow their captors. He had lived for over a thousand years and had single handedly fought off entire armies. People had thought he was immortal and even worshiped him before I had killed him.

It was better that people see me as I was; deadly and dangerous, a Mistborn. So many problems would have been dealt with so much more easily if people had been able to see me as that instead of a little girl. They wouldn't have tried to push things or tried to topple Elend's fledgling Empire if I had been seen as my feats suggested I was rather than how I looked.

People were gaping at me now. The children behind me weren't playing anymore. They were staring too. I could hear one of them babbling about capes, but the adults were silent. There was more fear than I had expected. A lot more. I got the impression they thought I was unhinged and about to slaughter everyone.

I felt a little unhinged. In the distance, beyond the adults, there was a street filled with metal carts that moved without the need of horses. I forced myself to ignore both them and the zooming noises that they produced. There were far too many strange things.

"Ricky! Come here Ricky!" One of the mothers was calling to their child. "Hurry now. We're going home."

It was as if the Ashmounts had exploded, such was the frenzy that was produced after Ricky was called for. Parents were running by me to get their children. Others were calling for them. Some of the people were pulling out strange blocks filled with metals. I didn't let the strangeness and how it flustered me show on my face. Didn't react to the flashes of light. Or let on just how odd it was to see people stare at their little rectangles.

I hadn't been trained as extensively in statecraft by Tindwyl as Elend had been, but I had still had some training. Enough so that my life as a skaa thief and the unregal habits such a life had instilled in me wouldn't destroy Elend's empire. So I knew that it was important that I act as if I had everything under control and as if people should be obeying me.

"Stop!" I shouted. I burned Zinc and Brass. They were the two emotional allomantic metals. With Zinc I could Riot emotion, making it greater. With Brass I could soothe emotion, making it less. I slammed a calm tinged with fear into everyone and the chaos around me subsided.

"Who rules this Dominance?" I called out again, louder this time. I swept my gaze across the crowd. One person, a boy with brown hair that looked to be about fifteen, five years my junior, didn't look as stunned as everyone else, though the older woman standing beside him didn't share his poise.

I strode towards him. "You there, who rules this dominance?"


	2. Chapter 2

When I was a youth working a thieving gang Kelsier had once barged into the crew's den. At the time I had been being beaten to death by the crew leader. I'd also thought that the the Ministry was sending agents to kill us, having realized they had made us during our last con. When he had entered, I had thought he was there to kill us. I'd been delirious with panic and crawling along the ground, desperate to escape. Then he'd used allomancy on me and I'd grown not just calm, but curious and I'd also stopped trying to escape. It had been a surreal experience.

The people in the clearing had been in a similar state. Perhaps because I'd made it clear that I'd killed the Lord Ruler. I wasn't sure exactly what had set them off. What I did know was that now things were contained. I'd taken away the panic they had and replaced it with a muted fear. People were still leaving the park and gathering up their children, but they weren't doing it in a blind panic.

There were a few exceptions. One of them was the person I had singled out for questioning. He was one of the few people in the park who hadn't panicked and I thought it spoke well of his character, but instead of answering my question he glanced to the woman beside him, then looked back to me, clearly confused.

I could sympathize with confusion. I felt confused too though I knew better than to show it.

Behind him a metal cart was moving, but there was no horse or skaa pulling it. How? I wondered. But it was just so obvious. Allomancers must be inside, either a Coinshot or a Lurcher. Maybe more than one. It explained why the metal bars hung over the street intersections. The allomancers needed something to push and pull against as they moved the cart down the roads.

I burned Bronze. Bronze, when burned, allowed an allomancer to sense allomantic pulses. Someone skilled with the metal, like me, could even go as far as identifying exactly what metal was being burned by the rhythm of the pulse.

I stopped walking toward the youth I had singled out as I realized that there was no metal being burned around me. None that I could sense anyway. There were few explanations for that. One was that somehow something other than allomancy was moving the carts. That seemed unlikely. The other option was that their allomancers burning copper, Smokers, riding in the carts. Copper cloaked allomantic pulses and protected its burner from emotional allomancy whenever it was being burned, but it didn't just dampen the allomantic pulses of the person burning the metal. It would block out the allomantic pulses of anyone within its field, so that they wouldn't be sensed by someone burning bronze.

Reen's words echoed in my head. Never trust a man who gives you good news.

"Lady, I don't know what a dominance is, but I know that right now you're breaking the law," the youth said, breaking me from my paranoid thoughts. "You can't just master people in public like this. You fucked up."

I burned iron again. This time, I tried to sense weapons through my ability to sense metal, but no one in the cars seemed to have metal swords or armor. They did have coins though. Lots of coins were in nearly every one of the carts.

That only made me more nervous. No one carried metal when fighting an allomancer. That was just stupid. If this was a trap, my opponents weren't being stupid.

I needed to figure out what was going on quickly. I didn't have time for games.

My dagger came into my hand. "How many allomancers do you have working with you? Where am I? How did you bring me here?"

He backpedaled and started to raise his hands, but I was much faster. Before he could even bring them up to defend himself I burned Pewter and moved. My shove caught him in the chest and he fell back.

Burning Zinc I flared his terror. His eyes widened and his mouth dropped. Then I burned brass soothing away his emotions and returning to him calm. "Answer me!" I said, narrowing my eyes.

"I don't know," he said, staring up at me from the ground.

"You said I fucked up?"

"The Birdcage or a kill order," he said. Finally he was talking. "They don't like that-"

"Who are they?" I cut him off.

"The PRT? Parahuman Response Team," he said. I glared at him for speaking nonsense, subtly burning zinc and brass to master his emotions. He was scared, but not so scared that he would do something stupid. He probably couldn't even tell that his emotions were being controlled. Not when I was trying to be subtle. "Shit,what do you want from me! I didn't do anything."

An obvious lie. If this was just an innocent park he was visiting, why had I appeared in it while fighting Inquistors? Something had brought me here, right? It didn't make sense that I just appeared for no reason.

Things happened for a reason. There were causes. Effects. And he hadn't even tried to explain the allomancers or whatever contraption was powering the carts.

"Are they hazekiller trained?" I wanted more information. If I was going to fight them I didn't want to be caught off guard.

"Hazekiller? Who's that?" He started pushing backwards against the ground, scrambling farther away from me. I pulled on the red interlocking grid of metal that the children had been playing on behind me to brace myself, then I pulled on his belt buckle. He slid back toward me.

"You can't run," I explained.

"Oh God."

"I killed him." Having killed the Lord Ruler was just the sort of thing he needed to remember about me right now. "You'll be next if you keep dodging my questions. Do you think this PRT is dangerous to me?"

"Yes." He believed what he said. I glanced at another one of the metal carts going past. Then back at the youth. They had carts without horses. Not just allomancy, but clever ways of applying it. Ways I didn't understand, because there was no way there were so many allomancers here.

He was right. This PRT probably was dangerous to me.

"What was the plan? Lull me into thinking things here were fine? Then attack?

"What? There is no plan! Look just calm down. No one's trying to hurt you."

I turned toward new sources of metal that were moving rapidly towards me. "You're lying," I said. "You just told me people were going to kill me, because I'd fucked up."

"I'm-" A siren sounded in the distance and I looked in the direction it was coming. The carts were pulling over and a black and white cart was roaring down the road. "That's the cop's lady. You should get out of here while you still can. We don't need a hostage situation as you debut, right?" I took in what he said. Effectively, he'd just admitted to being important enough to take hostage. I'd keep that in mind. He seemed to realize where my mind was going. "Fuck," he whispered.

I turned away from him, and walked calmly toward the cart. Two men spilled out of its side and raised black metal devices at me. I'd never seen them before. They were L-shaped, but one thing about them stood out to me. They had a trigger, like a crossbow and they were pointing them at me.

"Drop the knife!" One of the men shouted. He was in a uniform. A strange one, all black with a golden badge on the chest, but I could tell it was a uniform because the other person was wearing matching clothing.

I did. I also burned iron, projecting a field of iron pushing around me that would deflect whatever passed for crossbow bolts around here. Then I gave him a counter offer. "Drop the crossbow!" I shouted back.

"She's a cape! A master!"

The uniformed men opened fire.


End file.
